


Take It To the Grave

by ChromaticMarble



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Humanstuck, Zombies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-29
Updated: 2016-05-29
Packaged: 2018-07-10 21:32:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7008943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChromaticMarble/pseuds/ChromaticMarble
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s the end of the world for Karkat Vantas as the dead begin to rise. Things should not have turned out this way. He should have lived a normal, boring life, he should have…Not had to worry about the creaks outside and whether or not he'll keep his loved ones alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take It To the Grave

The plank trembled in both your hands as you stared bleary eyed at what you had done. Before you, bleeding endlessly on your front porch lied your neighbor, Mr. Hendricks. Mr. Hendricks had always been a pain in the ass to deal with, but he didn’t deserve what happened to him. What you did to him. You killed him. You beat him to death with this stupid plank that your father had never fixed. You were thankful for that now.

You tried not to wretch, swallowing the vile down as you backed into your house, leaving the other still furious and panicked shrieks disappear into the distance. The door clicked shut, you closed every lock, knowing that your father had stayed home, passed out in the kitchen probably, and your mother still trying to coax your older brother out of his room.  
You should have known better from the day Kankri decided to shut his mouth. He hadn’t spoken much, or done much in the last two days. In the last two days that neighbors started attacking and killing each other. He went to college in the city, a relatively far commute from your own rural little home which meant that he tended to stay with a friend of his and came home only for long weekends and holidays. 

He had been at the heart of it when this whole mess began. “A terrorist attack,” your father had dismissed. “It’ll blow over in a few days, and if it doesn’t, it won’t reach us out here.” Looking at your bloodied plank, for once in your life, you doubted your father. It was only a matter of time and how Kankri had come back, how the screams tended to go on for hours, that time was coming close.  
You heard the heavy tapping and hammering at the kitchen. That was odd, it wasn’t six o’clock yet and someone was hammering? In the kitchen where your father should be? You raised your plank, walking slowly to peer into your kitchen, and there he was, your father hammering away planks of wood in front of the kitchen window. You had to raise a brow at that.

“Dad?” 

He turned around to face you, a clear scowl on his face, a very familiar expression. He had nails clamped between his teeth an unsafe practice for the short man who stood perilously on a chair to reach the top. He turned back to his work, huffing with frustration.

“Well don’t just stand there kid! Help me hold this damn board up!”

You jumped at that and tossed your board aside, climbing onto the counter to hold the board up. With his hand free for a moment, the man took the nails out of his mouth and handed them to you, a still dangerous practice as your balance on these counters was just as good as his on the chair. Still, you hurting your hand sounded more passable than him stabbing the roof of his mouth. He hammered away, now holding the nail more stably.

“How’s your brother?”

“Still blissfully mute,” you retorted. He snorted, a grin spreading on his face.

“Yeah, that’s got your old mother worried,” he scoffed. “I say enjoy the silence. Still, Kankri’s not easily shaken. Well, you know shaken to being quiet. Damn, terrorists.”

“I don’t think that’s what they are,” you muttered. He gave you a curt glare, one you willingly returned. “What? Is the TV static not good enough for you?! Why are you boarding the window anyway? Are these the boards for the fence?”

“Look Kid, I don’t believe any of this walking dead bullshit, that’s from one of your stupid shows, not my life. There some kind of civil insurgence is all. That’s why I’m putting up the boards. It’ll take them longer to get in, and give me more time to bludgeon the hell out of ‘em so you can sleep fine. Your mother and brother on the other hand are in panic mode and believing this crap. Are you gonna go bonkers on me too, boy?”

“No,” you frowned, still holding on to the board. “But what about the screaming, Dad?”

“Some crazy kids, probably,” he dismissed. 

“What about you burning Kankri’s clothes, the ones he was wearing when he got here, what was that about?”

He paused for a moment. Then he grinned wickedly. “Never liked that hideous old sweater. He won’t miss it.”

That was absolute bullshit. You were not gonna put up with what your father was telling you. He couldn’t possibly be serious about this. You had just killed a man, a man you knew, right outside your house and he was acting like this was just another summer storm. You let go of the board, taking your father by surprise and getting his full attention.

“First Seattle, then New York, then Los Angeles then a bunch of other damn huge cities and you expect to believe this is local?! I’m sixteen Dad, not five! I don’t have to have this stupid watered down shit of an excuse for an explanation! I know those screams aren’t just about some crazy kids. And Kankri hasn’t spoken a word in two days, Dad! Two, fucking days! And you want me to believe this is not something huge I should be worried about?! I just killed a man outside my own home! He tried to kill me first but…but…oh god…I killed someone.”

Your hands started trembling again, nails clattering one by one onto the floor. Your voice cracked and your breath caught. You had killed somebody. That sensation was coming right back to you and it was sick and wrong and you hated every ounce of it. The look you father gave you wasn’t one of shock, disapproval or anything of the like, more like he had expected this. Your own father had expected you to kill someone and did little to change your mind about it as you crumpled to the ground, crying silently as Mr. Hendricks bloody corpse came back to you, the mashed disaster you had made of his head. You had killed him because he tried to kill you, a beastly look about him, but it didn’t remove the vileness of it all.

Then it clicked in your head.

“Is that what Kankri did?”

Your father sighed and crouched next to you, a hand on your shoulder. His face didn’t tell you anything other than he wasn’t going to tell you, you were wrong. “I don’t know what Kankri did or saw, but I can tell you that as soon as that boy came into this house the way he did, I knew there had to be some truth in what was said. You don’t walk back like that without having seen death.”

You gulped and pulled up your shirt. Those were not comforting words, but right now you weren’t sure you wanted to hear about it, you just knew you wanted to be alone, and wanted to think that was some long, horrible dream. You hadn’t done anything atrocious, your brother was still at school and when you told him about this stupid dream, he would scold you about watching too many horror movies at night. Tell you that you were being childish and you had both grown out of the phase of scaring yourselves for fun. You’d yell at him to shut up and you’d annoy each other, but neither of you would have any deep, dark secret, at least not more than lying to Mom that her ugly, itchy sweaters were the best. 

“Karkat, go get some sleep, your mom and I’ll finish this,” your father suggested. You didn’t want to sleep but you also didn’t want to sit on the kitchen floor arguing with the man over your moral state of mind. This was going to be your reality now. Accepting that some heads had to go. That was so sick and wrong. How could you even think of doing that ever again? 

You pulled yourself off the ground and began a shaky trek up the stairs, just barely able to keep the contents of your stomach. You passed your mother on the way up, her dark brown eyes soft and worried as she looked despairingly at Kankri’s door and staying near the same as she looked at you. Part of you wanted to smile at her as if saying, don’t worry like you always did when you came home with the occasional black eye. But you just couldn’t lie to your own mother like that. You just ducked your eyes and avoided the stout woman as she gently squeezed your arm for a moment.

Once at the top of the stairs, you looked at Kankri’s door, shut to your face but that wasn’t something new. Kankri liked his privacy despite never respecting anyone else’s. You had been into Kankri’s room, with invitation all of seven times in your entire life. He had some pretty cool books that either he would recommend to you or demand you read them by leaving them on your dresser sometime in the dead of night. Sometimes, you snuck in to get the books yourself which you were sure Kankri’s compulsiveness must have told him straight off the bat, but he never seemed to mind so long as you told him your opinion on the book. Sure, he would get more immersed in it than you, but that was the one thing you two did have in common. Your brother was an alright guy but he wasn’t someone you were dying to really hang out with.

Until now. Your hand hovered over the door knob. Maybe this was something else you two had in common now. A horrible, horrible thing but it was something you could both understand. Even if your parents had killed anyone now, they weren’t your age. You doubted it could feel the exact same. Not too different, but certainly not the same.  
You tried the doorknob. It twisted without a hitch, making you frown. You understood the whole respecting the privacy of her sons policy your mother had, but not trying to enter when Kankri was like this seemed negligible. She meant well, but your mother certainly needed to put her foot down more. It made you glad your father had done most of your upbringing, you had way less of a deserving attitude than Kankri did. 

“I’m coming in, doofus,” you announced as you pushed the door open. There were no protests or immediate pushing on the door. The room looked as it always did, clean, tidy and organized. Everything has its place and everything in its place. That was Kankri’s motto and one that stuck with you except during weekdays. The lights weren’t on, but Kankri’s window faced the setting sun, giving the shadows a nice tone that seemed out of place for the somberness. Your brother sat on his bed, chin resting on his knees as he looked in the direction of the setting sun. His brown eyes looked empty and rest of him just didn’t seem Kankri. His dark hair was unkempt, looking more like the disheveled mess that you always had on yourself, and you thought he had given up wearing that red atrocity years ago because he thought it made him look too ghastly.

“Kankri, you there?”

Kankri didn’t shift much other than spare you a glance before looking out the window. You sighed and took a seat on his bed. He technically never told you to leave. The shift made him turn to face you, as if he had finally noticed that you had entered.

“Thanks for your acknowledgement, asshole,” you scoffed. Kankri just pursed his lips. He wasn’t going to tell you to use your higher vocabulary? Kankri really did have it bad. He gulped and you knew exactly what was coming next as that new glisten came into his eyes. This was a more unusual event, one you rarely saw without the need of first divulging an unnecessary amount of words. He just started crying, hugging his knees tightly and clenching the sleeves of his sweater.

Normally you would have just awkwardly left the room, but now you gave him a tentative pat on the shoulder. He just kept shuddering as he whimpered and muttered unintelligible things, but you caught one thing: I’m sorry.

“What are you sorry about, you moron?” you inquired, not at all abrasive but merely a habit of punctuating anything addressed to him as an insult. 

“Karkat, it’s a broken world out there,” he wept, pausing for breath between words. “We’re not gonna be safe Karkat, I’m so sorry. Those things will find us, they’re everywhere and nobody knows what to do. I don’t know and I should have and I just…it’s my fault. All the blood…oh god…I’m sorry. I didn’t want to, I’m sorry.”

You couldn’t reply to that. Whatever had happened in the city had been horrible and it did involve exactly what you feared. You let him cry on your shoulder, something you would never remind him off because your brother was too much of an idiot to understand what he needed emotionally. You let a couple of your tears slide down, though nothing compared to Kankri. This is what he really had needed those last two days and you wish you had paid attention to that instead of staying in your room, listening to the screams of the night. What he really, really needed was to say what happened, but maybe even you wouldn’t be ready for that kind of thing. 

Maybe this would eventually blow over. Just maybe.


End file.
